


The Langosta Strain

by E_Rocc



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-02
Updated: 2017-08-02
Packaged: 2018-12-10 00:18:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11680071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/E_Rocc/pseuds/E_Rocc
Summary: Butterbugs found many applications, including one not even known to Enrique Borgos





	The Langosta Strain

Dr. Vaughn Weddell preferred to work alone. 

He was even pretty sure he knew why. After all, analysts analyze, and he always checked his assumptions and recalculated. After all, that’s what had led him to Barrayar to begin with. 

Labs in Jackson’s Whole were full of personal competition and jockeying for position. He despised that. His talents were genetics and biochemistry , not bullshitting. It was beginning to impact his ability to work independently. Thinking it through, Barrayar was good enough to appreciate his value, but not good enough to not need him badly. To be fair, that last could only be said about Cetaganda.

This had already made him a loner of sorts. But he had always been blunt and abrupt. The Big Secret of his past meant that he had to be even more terse. 

Weddell’s work was everything. He was fortunate that his interface with the world understood him and kept distractions away quite effectively. Still, as far as people he trusted her, her husband, and perhaps the young Vorkosigans were pretty much it. Of course, having Allegres and Vorkosigans on his team made for some formidable shielding.

In some ways he envied the young Escobaran, Borgos. He trusted people despite having been nearly burned himself. He had the spectacular wife and young daughter that vaguely reminded Weddell of his own goals at that age. He had Connections. His role would expand. 

But he was naïve, and so trusting. He was brilliant to be sure, and his bugs were a masterpiece. Weddell was not sure he would have ever come up with them even pointed in the right direction.

But Borgos was too “nice” to realize their full potential. That could not be said for House Bharaputra’s erstwhile top geneticist.

\--------

 

The concept had initially come from Lord Mark Vorkosigan. With an inadvertent assist from Martya Borgos.

MVK Enterprises was basically run by two couples. Both pairs were balanced, as couples often are, but their outlooks on life were more compatible across relationship lines. Enrique and Kareen were optimistic, positive, and even sunny most of the time. They generated most of the farflung ideas. It was left to the typically cynical Mark and Martya to poke holes in the concepts, and make them practical when they could not.

The development of the Raina strains of butterbug had made the corporation one of the most important on Barrayar. Their effectiveness at converting native Barrayaran vegetation into food, feed, fertilizer, or fuel compatible with Earth descended biochemistry had been so effective that preserves had been established to protect what had once been seen as an ubiquitous nuisance.

This got the attention of the Marilacans.

Marilac had thrown off its Cetagandan occupation years earlier. Sort of. Cetagandan developed plant life still contaminated its agricultural base, to the point that a planet that had once been a major exporter of food was now the opposite. While some of the Cetagandan flora was indeed toxic, much of it would have been edible were not the Marilacan people so repulsed by its origins.

Marilac wanted a version of Raina that would attack plant life that was either based on the biochemistry of any of the Cetagandan imports or genetically modified by means other than those used domestically pre-invasion. Ideally this would produce fertilizer that would replenish the soil for native plants, but this was a secondary benefit. Anything that replaced Cetagandan works with Marilacan or even Barrayaran (the historical analogy was lost on no one) was a good thing. The bugs would need to reproduce rapidly, spread aggressively, and die out quickly once their food supply was exhausted.

The Beatrice strains exceeded all expectations. Three versions produced fertilizer, animal feed, and a form of Barrayaran butter, and did so fast enough that within three years the planet could once again feed itself. 

\-------

That did it. 

The orders poured in. Even on Escobar, a small group of Enrique’s erstwhile creditors bought out the others and negotiated a deal for an arborvine eating butterbug. Escobaran law allowed fraud charges to be cancelled by compensated victims. So Enrique was free and clear, and already planning a visit. Loudly and gleefully, to Kareen mostly.

Even Enrique knew not to wax poetic about Escobar to Martya. To him it was home. To her, it was that foul place that had tried to take him away and sabotage their new found wealth. She sat and simmered, and finally observed to Mark that she wished they could program the Visconti strain to work backwards.

Martya knew that look. It was the look Miles got when he got An Idea. A darker version, to be sure. But it was scary enough with Miles even when he was a teenager. This was moreso, and she decided she didn’t want to know.

\------

Mark wouldn’t have told her anyway. Enrique would not have understood and absolutely would not have Approved.

The good news was that he also hadn’t thought much of the extinction code in the genetics of the Beatrice bugs. To Enrique, the bugs fell somewhere between children and favored pets. He couldn’t get motivated, and therefore couldn’t make it work, and help was needed. A casual comment around Miles to that effect found its way to the Imperial Science Institute, and Dr. Vaughan Weddell joined the team. He made it work.

So MVK owed the Imperium a favor, and Mark had a way to pay. Weddell already understood the way the bugs worked. Mark provided any further information he needed, and a lab similar to MVK’s best was built deep in ISI’s most secure section.

\------

Severnya Island was the most isolated piece of land on Barrayar. Literally. 717 kilometers away from the closest point on South Continent, there was no significant land mass further away from a continent anywhere on the planet.

Two years earlier at the beginning of the project, Raina bugs had been used to denude it of Barrayaran vegetation. The soil had been restored to be compatable with Earth plants, and when it was time to test the new bugs all seven square kilometers bloomed and thrived.

Forty three days later, the only signs of what had been life were the decaying bugs. They had done their job, rapidly reproducing and consuming the vegetation at an exponentially increasing rate. Between the “butter” they produced and their carcasses, the soil was rendered chemically barren. Not even stranglevine, one of the most determined and resistant weeds in the Nexus, survived.  
The test had been an unequivocal success. Barrayar had a new, potent, and potentially devastating weapon in its arsenal. One even Weddell hoped they would never need.

But he had done his job, and done it well. Weddell was a proud man and he was just as proud of this creation.

“Time to go, doctor. Once we’re gone, we’ll quarantine the island for fifty kilometers out.

“The cover?”

“Top Secret. Some who dig will hear about a fetaine spill. That will keep *everyone* away. In a couple of weeks we’ll clean up the “spill” with a thermobaric bomb, then work on restoring the island. The weapon will be secured. Good thought on the dormancy state. “

Dr. Weddell was satisfied. Working as a team wasn’t so bad if one’s counterparts were competent, and Colonel Vorandreyev was that and then some. The secret was secure and hopefully would stay that way.

For a brief moment, Weddell thought back to when he was a young boy named Hugh Canaba. While there was virtually no religion on the Whole, his Escobaran grandmother retained her Catholic roots. To teach him her native Spanish as well as other things, she would tell him stories from their holy book. Including one about a God who, loyal to his people, sent a series of afflictions at their captors. Including bugs who had ravaged their crops.

And gave their name to the Langosta strain.


End file.
